RaveThe Cortland ReviewHass\' new collection—his first in a decade—brings with it the notebook vibe of a poet reaching the middle of his seniority, though traces of the likable Boy Wonder persona, the floral shirt-wearing hiker, Basho-quoting, California-dreaming quester is always, you feel, looking over the shoulder of the veteran ... some of the best poems have the slab look of un-stanzaed poems (like much of Jack Gilbert), they are in fact, nimble and conversational. Even so, the book opens under an elegiac cloud, which, while eventually dissipating, becomes the sustaining hue for the whole ... The imagination doesn\'t have to take sides, and this fact poses a problem. At bottom you feel a moral basis underlying many of the poems, but its authority is always tenuous, its mutual sharing subject to many contingencies ... Of course he\'s serious at all points, but he\'s too intelligent to let the poems succumb to the tedium of gravity their subjects might otherwise find themselves entitled to ... There is much to admire in Summer Snow. I am tempted to say that the appearance of the greats in his poems suggests that Hass has joined their ranks, and why not? Few write with more even grace about his matter, from the insignificant and particular to the important and generalizable. Few are as accessible in his asides, Mobius strip loops and sidebars or even-handed in his worldview ... Neither a wild man crying in the desert, nor a cosmopolitan tap-dancing on the page, Hass has carved a middle way that is as effectual in its power to convince as any contemporary bard or poetry technician. And the work feels complete because he has made his purpose to be both at ease and engaged—or perhaps compact with the contradictions that arise, welts or not, his or others,\' with every scratch of the pen.
